I am Ming Yin, a computer science PhD student at Harvard, interested in social computing and crowdsourcing.

During my graduate study at Harvard, I was a member of the EconCS group. I was very fortunate to be advised by Professor Yiling Chen. Before Harvard, I got my bachelor degree in Computer Software from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China. I also visited City University of Hong Kong as an exchange student in my junior year. .

Research

My primary research interests lie in the interdisciplinary field of social computing and crowdsourcing. I design and conduct large-scale online behavioral experiments to obtain a quantitative perspective on participants' behavior in social computing and crowdsourcing systems. Based on the empirical evidence from the behavioral data, I further work on designing realistic models, novel algorithms and effective interfaces to facilitate the development of more intelligent and sustainable systems. My research broadly connects to the fields of artificial intelligence and applied machine learning, computational social science, human-computer interaction and behavioral economics.

Understanding the Crowd

I empirically examine who the crowd workers are and how they complete crowdwork using online behavioral experiments. These works have contributed to present a quantitative picture of the lives of crowd workers, who:

quantitatively modeling the patterns in human behavior in reaction to incentives (IJCAI'15, HCOMP'16)

designing algorithms and interfaces towards more effective use of crowdsourcing incentives (IJCAI'15, CHI'16)

Online Experimentation for Behavioral Sciences Via Crowdsourcing

I use crowdsourcing platforms as a channel to get access to a large pool of diverse people who are willing to participate in scientific experiments. I conduct online experiments on crowdsourcing platforms to: